At the time it was produced, it was freely downloadable. Lindows even posted it out to users.

In the present circumstances, such older distros, should still be freely re~distributable; most particularly where the person who has a developers copy and uses it for non commercial purposes.

I have not read the detailed agreement between Lindows and MS, but I am pretty sure, that Lindows was never asked by MS to recall all the Lindows CD's it had sent out across the world. Nor was it asked to trace all the downloaded copies. All it was asked to do, was to re~badge the product.

Under the circumstances, I am not asking the former Lindows company to burn a copy, nor is any money going to exchange hands, (other than to cover postage and the cost of the Cd disk itself), then it should not be a problem.

Finally, I stress, I have no intention of redistributing this distro for monetary gain, nor am I even intending going on the net while running it.

It is as I said, more than anything, a way of keeping my old machine running.

Aquafire

PS:

Come to think of it, this whole matter now raises a hairy problem; that of past distros, that are being distrubuted or have been distributed, that are no longer covered by new legal agreements.

EG. Other than Lindows, is it illegal to use SUSE 9, now that Novell has signed and agreement with MS...etc...?

Lindows could be downloaded free of charge for a limited time, that id not make it freely distributable.

As for SUSE9, the licence in force is the one that came withit, it can't be changed retrospectively. Novell can change the licence terms for later releases, which they did by releasing more of the code under the GPL. Many of the older distros were far more restrictive in terms of distribution than the current crop, which is why you didn't see SUSE 7/8/9, Red Hat 9 or Lindows on LXF cover discs, and you'd have had to look very closely to find Red Hat 8.

"Insanity: doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results." (Albert Einstein)